Lately I have been working on several different projects, most of which I have planned for the past year and am now getting to and that has been very nice. This means that my shoulder has been healing very well and that my other obligations have slowed down a bit. One of my favorites these days has been creating these little travel sketch/notebooks inspired by Traveler's Company. The one on the right I had created for my husband out of leather and then decided to create an artistic one with canvas I had gessoed and painted for myself.

Inside the covers I have placed three 5.5x3.5 blank and lined kraft moleskine journals and I am hoping to add squared (graph paper) and dotted grid (used for bullet journalling and technical or 3D drawing) ones as well. My husband uses his for travel notes, mileage, books he's read or wants to read and other notes while I use mine for sketching and journalling. The great thing about these is that booklets can be added and removed as required and I can have several booklets with me at a time. The cover also protects the edges and corners of my papers as I carry it in my purse or backpack. I'm also drawn to these kraft moleskines because they're based on the notebooks Hemingway and Picasso used, they feel very traditional and are small enough to carry in my back pocket.

Instead of going into detail about how I created mine, here is a link to a youtube video. Instead of creating the holes like she does in the video, I punched three holes along the top and bottom so that I could use a longer elastic loop to create four strands down the inside center for holding the booklets. The center hole I used to add a separate elastic which was used to keep the travellers' sketchbook cover closed. I also rounded the corners of my cover by using a pen lid as a stencil to draw around and then cut them out with scissors. In order to add more than 4 notebooks, use an elastic which would be wrapped around the center of both of the notebooks then slide them underneath the other notebooks (also shown in video). I'm thinking that I will also include watercolour papers that I will cut, fold and add in this way.